According to Wired News, the hackers, from the Norwegian group Masters of Reverse Engineering (MoRE), said they'd been able to break through the uncrackable code because Xing Technologies' XingDVD software had failed to protect their decryption key as all DVD technology licensees are required to do.

Xing Technologies, you may recall, is a wholly owned subsidiary of RealNetworks. Whoops. DVD files are encrypted using 40-bit keys. While that's usually considered secure for most such transactions -- though it's still rather less than the standard for e-commerce transactions, which increasingly use 128-bit keys -- it is held to be difficult to crack unless you have a very powerful system and/or a lot of time.

Because Xing failed to encode its decryption key, MoRE was apparently able to figure out the format, and claim to have found over 170 other keys that will decrypt DVD files. Each DVD has 400 keys programmed in. All these keys are used by their 60K DeCSS application, which can copy the files from a DVD and save them in an unencrypted format on a hard drive.

Wired News found many of the movie and consumer electronics industries' trade organisations decidedly unwilling to comment of the news of the crack, so it's clear that they're rattled. However, such is the growing demand for DVD that a fix can't be far off, but implementing it quickly won't be cheap. Will RealNetworks be forced to pay for the work, we wonder? ®